utopian alternatives to troy independence. which means that. with a clear independence opposes the rest of the world with. julian assange in his own words from internet freedom to cable gate r.t. sits down with the wiki leaks founder inside the ecuadorian embassy in london hear his thoughts straight ahead on r.t. . as democrats and republicans argue over the fiscal cliff here in washington could this be just another attempt by the g.o.p. to shoot santa claus i'll explain what i'm talking about and why you can read more about this in hustler magazine in just a moment. the two thousand and twelve election is over and conservatives lost

coming up we'll look at how religious affiliation played a big role in the way americans voted and how non-religious voters are changing the political playing field here in the u.s. . it's friday november thirtieth five pm in washington d.c. i'm meghan lopez and you're watching r.t. . all right starting office hour he's the man who's made a name for himself by sharing explosive government leaks on the secret spilling website known as wiki leaks and is now facing the consequences for those data drops love him or hate him the press and public can't seem to get enough of the wiki leaks co-founder julian a son of his tale after all is one of classified documents innovating authority in other words the perfect made for t.v. drama and this case is far from over r.t. international had a chance to sit down with the man himself to find out the latest developments in

his political standoff here's part of that interview with our tease laura smith. you'll saying basically in your book that the internet can in slave but the internet is just a thing right it's a soulless piece of equipment who was a wheel in slave. the people who control the interception of the internet and to some degree also physically control the big data warehouses and international fiber optic lines so we all think of the internet as some kind of potomac rome where we can throw out ideas and communications and with pages and books and they exist somewhere out there actually they exist on web servers in new york nergal your in beijing and information comes to us through satellite connections or through fiber optic cables so whoever physically controls this controls the realm of our ideas and communications and whoever is able to sit on those communications channels can

intercept entire nations and that's the new game in town as far as state spying is concerned intercepting entire nations not individuals and yes this sounds like a kind of futuristic scenario but you're saying that the siege is already here i mean the united states' national security agency has been doing this for some thirty twenty years but now it's spread to even mid-size nations even gadhafi libya was employing the eagle system which is produced by french company amasis. push there in two thousand and nine advertised in its internal documentation as a nationwide in perception system so so what's happened over the last ten years is . every decreasing costs of intercepting each individual now to the degree where is cheaper to intercept every individual than it is to pick particular people to spy upon and what's the what's the alternative this sort of utopian alternative that you would get for it so the token alternative is to try and gain independence

for this for the internet to sort of clear independence versus the rest of the world and that's really quite important because if you think about what is human civilization that makes it into centrally human and civilized it is our shared knowledge that intellectual knowledge. it's something we're all putting on to the internet and so if we can try and decouple that from. the brute nature of states and the cronies then i think we really have hope for a global civilization if on the other hand the mere security guards you know the people who control the guns are able to take control of our intellectual life take control of all the ways in which we communicate to each other then of course you can see how dreadfully outcome will be because we're just happened to one nation it will happen to every nation at once it is happening to the nation at once as far as

spying is concerned because now every nation is merging its society with internet infrastructure and in what way are we as source of naive internet users if you like and i exclude you from that obviously but kind of willingly collaborating with these collectors of personal data you know we all have a facebook account we all have telephones which can be tracked by people think well yeah i use facebook and maybe the f.b.i. if they made a request could come and get it and everyone is much more aware of it now of course because of betrayers but that's not the problem the problem is that all the time everyone nearly everything they do on the internet is permanently recorded every web search do you know what you were thinking one year two days three months ago so you don't know but google knows it remembers the national security agency intercepts the request if it flowed over u.s. border it knows will be. national security agency which. was the research paid for the national security agency's signals intelligence division

describes this as turning key to tell it terrorism that all the infrastructure has been built for absolute totalitarianism it's just a matter of turning the key and actually the case has already been to a little bit and it is now affecting people who are targeted for us drone strikes organizations like wiki leaks. national security reporters who are having their sources investigated is already probably turned and the question is would go all the way now as he certainly isn't the only outlet with an eye on a songe c.n.n. host erin burnett recently interviewed the man behind the wiki leaks to talk about his new book cypherpunks but it didn't exactly go as planned i want to start by asking you something at the very beginning of your book that really shocked me and you said the internet is a threat to human civilization and i thought i saw that and i thought but the

internet is the tool by which to julian assange to become one of the world's most controversial people where you've published all this information why is the internet bad. oh here's a book here is well it's all aback as well that quote looks like it started off on the wrong foot and it only escalated from there. they're in a situation where the i don't agree to talk about the railings really in situ or i'm sorry well maybe burnett should have been talking more about the surveillance state her network is after all c.n.n. is beginning to resemble r.t. in many ways with all of its coverage of bradley manning domestic drones and cyber security now r.t. america had a chance to collaborate with our sister station r.t. international to pose a few questions to assad ourselves here's one of the questions we here in d.c. wanted answered in particular than that our viewers have asked numerous times was an increasing war on whistleblowers we wanted to know if there could ever be another cable gates give us

a kleenex you know what was the time. when you go into it but hopefully earlier rather than later i mean do you feel when you who is making these releases you have as knowledgeable as you have. cable these extraordinary publishers or peter told months it is the most significant because previously from the iraq war those four hundred thousand documents showing one hundred or one hundred thousand people being killed and precisely how that was also. very significant but yes no one has done anything as significant as that since but. hopefully. those the will continue with the successes of wiki leaks. shouldn't be viewed merely as a demonstration of our organizations for reality or the realty of the activist community on the internet. they are also

a function of this hoarding of information. by these national security states the reason that there was so much information to leak the reason it could be leaked all at once is because they had hoarded so much why had they hoarded so much wealth to gain extra power through knowledge that they wanted their own knowledge internally to be easily accessible to their people to be searchable so it is much power to be extracted from it as possible. the here we here exude attempts to redress the imbalance of power by taking what's inside these very powerful institutions and giving them to. the commons people in general so we can understand how world works and stop takeover by these powerful institutions but it's a function of how much. no we've situations have

a kid next week marks two years since a songe gave himself up to the british authorities and we will continue to keep you posted on this story as it unfolds. and speaking of wiki leaks and cable gate we want to know what you think does the american public have a right to this information or should it have been kept a secret well or harshness of the resident dot net to that question to the streets of the big apple. it's been two years since wiki leaks released what's now known as cable gate the world's largest leak of classified u.s. material so has it changed the world much this week let's talk about that i'm going to thought what i don't know doesn't hurt so if your government is killing innocent people you're ok with that i'm not so you're ok with that but. i know i'm contradicting myself but i obviously don't want my government to kill innocent people but in the same boat. how do i know they're innocent but the government full

of people we should know what's going on would they do and what are called when they keep secrets the secret is only for them i think is only going to benefit them they're not acting for our best center and doing so i don't think so if you run the government and you lead or you run a business a say a business and you lead everyone from your employees to the person who's the janitor know everything about your business something's going to come back and haunt you and so maybe you shouldn't do anything that would haunt you. if. you have a good point knowledge is power right so we found out some information so that's a positive thing but i don't know if it's changed anything you don't think it's changed the way the government might act i think if they broke through some sort of firewall to get this information they probably built a new firewall that they can't break through quite as easily they have to do what they think is best for the country and if this is going to upset people and cause a lot of it had to be done i think but do you think we have

a right to now if we're doing if they're doing things like holding people that are innocent. wow i guess i think i just know that so i don't think it's changed anything i think the government is going to make it more of a secret you know as long as there's money power involved i don't think anything's going to change the information has since the printing of good will burke and the fortune sentry. the public is allowed to have information what about the government are they allowed to have information about us certainly yes so what about the people who protested that the government is using the internet to spy on us. well if you want to spy on each other just look at today just to minutes ago syria just closer to the internet so is that a government the i think of the government especially the what america is the world has. a lot of the please forgive everybody whether or not we feel like wiki leaks has changed the world the bottom line is governments might now feel like they have

their own big brother watching and hopefully that's a good thing. when you think of hustler magazine what comes to mind most likely the answer is naked women you probably wouldn't think of a magazine of this in particular magazine as an alternative new source or a platform for free speech but over the years hustler magazine has made a name for itself in the realm of erotica but also in pushing the limits when it comes to first amendment rights between the pages of adult entertainment real substance has in the past made its way into the magazine the december issue of the magazine features an article coauthored by tom hartman the host of the big picture here on our t.v. as well as big picture producer sam sachs is called who shot santa and it speaks about the incentive system democrats have set up to earn public support and how republicans are attempting to sabotage that strategy here now to explain more about

this article as well as their decision to have it published in hustler magazine tom hartman and sam sacks welcome gentlemen so first off let's let's go ahead and address that question what made you want to publish it in a magazine that is well known for being an adult entertainment magazine we go through a lot of things for publications like alternate truth. you know published. other large venues that generally are not read by joe sixpack and hustler magazine if you want to reach middle america if you want to reach the the average middle class joe six-pack guy out there is one of the best place to do it and larry flynt has been fighting a progressive fight i mean for a long long time in one thousand nine hundred eighty took it all the way the supreme court in one case when jerry falwell sued him so. that you know there's several men's magazines that have been out in front in that in that arena for a lot of years as one of how did you come about coming with this this article in

particular for this magazine in particular were you approached by him or that he approached you guys with this idea well i had written an article about the two santa clause three join his case to santa clause three and a number of years ago and the folks at hustler i've written for them a couple of times they've excerpted from a couple of my books in fact the weirdest experience for me with regard to this was maybe three years ago when my book screwed came out and they excerpted a chapter from a piece a piece of a chapter and on the front cover it said get screwed by tom hartman and so. that's you know that was the cover and the cover. but it was but it was very well received and there was a lot of very positive feedback from from middle class folks you know they contacted us and said you know can you revisit this santa clause thing and. sam has been writing on this topic and so we and it's a good opportunity those you talked about in the intro alternative media here i

mean i did score we're trying to address a major problem with the middle class in america right now and we need to get that message out to as many people as as we can not just people who read the new york times the wall street journal or whatever but also people who read hustler magazine . and i think that is what this magazine does here is actually a copy if we can go ahead and zoom in on that here's a copy of the december issue now because they are right there it says who shot seneca. on the articles right here in the center along with a bunch of things that i just can't show you guys for the sake of off this is the news from around you as it does as you are saying but it does reach a certain audience that you aren't going to get and what i do know is also that this magazine and others make sense in the way to congressional offices do you think they just throw it away or do you hope that somebody will read your article i know for a fact that they don't throw away used to work on the hill for two years and once a month hustler magazine would come and you know i can remember one day when

i was three phones in the office and everything i look at our poll of interns there and they just have this magazine up and they're looking at there and you guys are going to congressional offices but i just read the articles. there and see that there are a lot of. those go to every every office larry flynt make sure to send it to every office on capitol hill and there is a lot of relevant political information in every issue actually and and you know when you when you opened the segment you were talking about the democratic strategy now the republicans are trying to blow it up it's really kind of the other way around democrats have been. you know historically or certainly since since f.d.r. selection democrats have been providing not just what people wanted but what people needed. democratic programs like social security medicare the minimum wage the right to unionize these what the republicans refer to as gifts these are the things

that created the american middle class you know one of the first and largest middle classes in literally in the history of modern society and and the republicans been trying to take that down since the thirty's and they finally came up with a strategy in the mid seventy's and seventy six to do and it's came up with a strategy and it got implemented in one nine hundred eighty by the reagan administration and the republicans have been playing the. again ever since and that's what the article so let's go ahead and toss to i have a couple of sound bites for you guys that are from a couple of republicans that spoke after the twenty thousand election about this so-called gets program and don't get into the meat and potatoes of your article and really what you are trying to deal with from the federal conservatism in my humble opinion did not lose last night it's just very difficult to beat santa claus it is practically impossible to beat santa claus people are not

going to vote against santa claus if there are fifty percent of the voting public who want stuff. they want things and who is going to give them things president obama he knows it and he ran on it. so here we are talking about and they're talking about these things this stuff that they're dealing with let's go ahead and break down this two santa clause area that you broke down and hostler magazine break it down for the average joe for me. it's funny that they're talking rush limbaugh specifically uses the word santa clause because in a way that's that's a misnomer i mean we use that in the article because it's a good way to get across these ideas but that's kind of belittling what democrats have done since since the great depression really and it's the same language that you do when it's key uses in one thousand nine hundred six when he writes this op ed called the two santa clause there which basically asserts that democrats have achieved political success because they're giving people things such as social as

tom talked about for security unemployment insurance later medicare and everything like that and if a party is running on these things people tend to vote for them so if republicans are saying we can't afford them we can't do that and about things like the party of scrooge and nobody really wants to vote for the party of scrooge so when it's key puts forward this this idea that says well republicans need to act like santa clause two in the best way they can do that is by giving people tax cuts give people tax cuts never wait for a waiver from the tax cuts tax cuts tax cuts and we've seen that is the strategy republicans have have carried forward ever since then all the way to today with the fiscal cliff and everything in it actually was a fair you know for its time it was the right suggestion if you're a republican and you're trying to get power because in the seventy's because of the very high inflation rates of the seventy's a lot of people who were you know middle class and very little in federal income taxes as they started moving up the bread it was called bracket creep at the time

and and their taxes were going up because their pay was going up although their purchasing power wasn't going up so average middle class people were paying to federal taxes that they had meant and before. so when the republicans became the tax part of the tax cut santa clauses you know it caught on there was there was it wasn't just hey you know let's help out the help of the rich guys although it's become that but then the second piece of it was and this is where it was just masterful and it was executed by the reagan administration if you look at the entire history of the united states and you inflation adjust the dollars from the george washington administration when we were we started with the deficit we had the french a lot of money to fight the revolutionary war from then until the reagan administration there were a few bombs for the civil war the spanish-american war war war war war two but basically our deficit has always been in the neighborhood of about a trillion dollars current dollars and in fact you want to have a deficit alexander hamilton the first treasury secretary wrote about this at some length because you want to have people you want to have something that stable that

people can invest in where they can invest in their government you know a. safe place to invest. so when reagan came along they were like ok if we do the tax cut thing then the deficits going to go up now how can that be a good thing because we're publicans we're not supposed to be in favor the deficit going up but when women if the deficit goes up you know if we can really drive the deficit up then when the democrats come into power as inevitably will we can start yelling and screaming about the deficit and force them to cut back on the social programs we can force them to shoot their own santa clause and that's exactly what they did reagan took that one trillion dollar deficit it was about eight hundred billion dollars we came into office and took it up to about three trillion by the time he left and then george herbert walker bush after him took it up to about five and then bill clinton brought in balanced budgets because for eight years you had a democrat in office and so the republicans were all screaming about the debt in the deficit and then george bush comes in and takes it up to ten trillion just

massively explodes and now again the republicans are out yelling time to shoot the democratic senate was over the last thirty years i mean the vast majority of that has been republicans roughly ten trillion dollars of that has been put on by republican presidents and their kids to what the clip that rush limbaugh was saying you can't beat santa claus and that's what you're going to he was talking about you can't beat santa clause so he advised republicans play their own santa clause but he didn't explicitly talk about how you know if we run up this massive debt the democrats will eventually have to cut back but that is how you end up beating santa clauses you force democrats to shoot them and that's what we're seeing played out here as you have and we only have a short time left by the i want to get to two quick things first of all you end your article by saying that it's time to put down the gun and not shoot santa clause how can we do this responsibly well the republicans keep historically they did it with clinton ministration you know any welfare as we know it they did it with the obama administration last year foreseen obama to cut unemployment benefits

for ninety nine weeks down to seventy four weeks as part of a compromise democrats have to. saying ok we're going to go along with these cuts this is crazy we are a great nation we're one of the wealthiest nations in the world we can easily afford these kinds of social welfare programs and more frankly i mean our our spending our government spent as a percentage of g.d.p. is about a half of what it is for most of the developed countries of the world there's all kinds of room it's just that you have to have the rich and the corporations pay their fair share and that needs to be you know the democrats need to stop saying ok we'll join you in shooting santa claus or we will shoot santa claus and instead say no we're going to stand up for working people and we're going to see how this all plays out with the fiscal cliff we do know that deadline is coming i was enjoying issues straight as an absolutely if your theory of the net that there of doing as good as right then that's absolutely a shoot santa clause very tom hartman host of the big picture and sam sachs but pressure from those are thank you guys so much for joining me but thanks very well it's that time of year again not for eggnog and presents for

a look back on twenty twelve and how do you do that with lists of course now normally people are trying to get on the list most influential most successful wealthiest most powerful you get the idea but there's one list that came out that no one wants an on g q's list of lists influential people of the year that least influential people of the year some past winners include temple on to another people better left out of the history books so who tops the list of twenty twelve there are some interesting choices first up j.p. morgan chase c.e.o. jamie dimon despite a more than four billion dollars loss in the bank's infest an arm capitol hill's favorite banker kept his job but he couldn't keep himself off of this list. next up michelle obama you think she had a good year what with her president and her husband winning the election but her let's move campaign hasn't kept americans away from the potato chips and lazy boys

next up madonna the material girl started off her year at the super bowl but then went on a world tour that fizzled out and apparently her controversial political statements just can't stir the pot like they used to and it is this what democracy looks like not to g.q. who put the occupy movement on the list citing a lack of real change stemming from protests in zuccotti park but this list may have been written before occupy sandy and the rolling jubilee came about and finally the man with the slogan what was it again it doesn't matter he lost mitt romney the man who lost to president obama in an economy that no one thought an incumbent president could survive yet somehow despite campaigning for six straight years he still couldn't get more than forty seven percent of the vote so much for being influential so there you have it coming out this month we'll bring you our

own list of most influential people of two thousand and twelve so stay tuned. well for as long as the us has been around there is that a separation between church and state but that didn't stop religion from creeping into the two thousand and twelve elections despite this progressive ideas have gained major ground things like marijuana and gay marriage so politicians might not need to pander to the even jellicoe base anymore r t correspondent liz wahl takes a closer look at this changing political landscape. for social and religious conservatives the election was devastating what we're seeing in our projections it's all of the white establishment is now the minority but conservatives put up a fight we've seen probably the most infusion of religious issues and doctrine into an election cycle probably since the late one nine hundred eighty s. during the primaries rick santorum rose as a front runner providing the social conservative platform many republicans yearned

for i don't believe in an america where the separation of church and state is absolute he wasn't alone in the race to be the next republican nominee sometimes seem like a race to prove who is more religious i have a sense of assurance about the direction i think that god is speaking and in my heart that i should go when i finally realized that it was say that this is what i needed to do i was like moses. you've got to roll me. sure now you're not supposed to doubt god but this was more than rhetoric their agendas were influenced by religious doctrine the social issues have really been consumed by a religious agenda at least for the religious right i mean there's no question that they're fighting as hard as they can to get abortion ban gay marriage ban seventy eight percent of white evangelical christians went for romney according to exit polls despite their efforts historic victories for gay marriage in two states voted

to legalize marijuana both triumphs for the socially liberal but not all churches wanted a socially conservative outcome the church of the flying spaghetti monster aims to separate church and state the religious satire has over two hundred thousand followers on facebook it's part of pasta fairy and members claim they are touched by his newly appendage of course it's all meant to make a statement there's equal evidence for the flying spaghetti monster as there is for god or santa claus in fact an unprecedented number of americans don't identify with their religion the number of nonbelievers or actually people with no religious affiliation we call them the nuns. is growing rapidly recent data from the pew research center shows one fifth of americans and a third of adults under thirty have no religious affiliation that's the highest percent.